Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  Only the dingy blankets, the flat sepia pillow, and the limp sheets that would be sure to rip were he to lie down on the cot one more night, only these were left to throw over the rail. His last night on this cot—he hadn’t known it was his last, and this unknowing was like a trick played on him, a humiliation, the last, the deepest, the most mysterious of all the deprivations of his life, the ones known to him and the ones he could never even suspect.

  On the porch for the last time she looked out over the neighborhood at the roofs, the few, low trees, the mist that indicated where the lake must be. The landlady was in the kitchen, fixing supper for her husband, who would be home soon. It had taken a day to clear out the accumulation from almost twenty years in that room and the things from the stucco bungalow. Her brother had brought her here at last to this high porch above a damp yard where his possessions lay in a large, darkening heap.

  The dust of the room over her clothes, her hair, her hands, she locked his door. There was no use in trying to rid herself of the dust before she went out into the city. Her hands refused to do anything about it anyway. Back along the hallway, past flimsy, narrow doors close together, through fumes of menthol from behind one door, down the rubber-tread stairs and into the vestibule with the pay phone on the wall and the chair with a broken leather seat. She would come back tomorrow, to bid the landlady good-bye and to find the pastry cook and thank him for caring for her brother.

  Out on the sidewalk the cold of early evening got through her raincoat, the advance cold of the coming winter. She had no heavy coat, she had never owned one or wanted one, nor any clothes other than a couple of skirts, a couple of blouses, a sweater, wanting no more than a few things easily carried to the capitals of the world and its far outposts, everywhere she had never been. She had wanted to be invisible—that was another reason for only the few possessions. Invisible, moving among people everywhere, observing all particulars and no one able to observe her.

  On the bus she looked out at the streets familiar to her brother, at the cafés where he sat at counters, friendly to proprietors and waitresses, imagining himself a man of the world always on the verge of a momentous occasion. The bus entered the park, a prosperous section where lamps were already lit in the entrances of high apartment buildings, the glimmering lights restoring shades of gold to the twilight trees, and she imagined him striding through this park like someone on a mission of historical consequence, or like a large skimming bird keeping up with the bus. Unless he had slowed down toward the end, lamed by the pain in his heart, and then she saw that his face was not a young face anymore, that his vision of the world belonged to the face of an older man whom she might not recognize at first glance.

  Along by the lake, the bus moved slowly through the glare and glitter of heavy traffic, and she saw him hurrying to a night job or homeward bound, a figure in several layers of other men’s clothes, his heavy overcoat flapping in the wind, and a fedora, with a high-class firm’s name on the silk lining, down low to his eyebrows. On the bridge over the dark waters reflecting the gold and silver lights of this downtown, he paused, imagining his sister beside him at the railing. There, you see? It’s Lake Michigan, you see? pointing to make sure she wasn’t looking for it in another direction.

  15

  Up in her unlit room on the hotel’s fifteenth floor she drew apart the drapes to see a little more of this city at dusk. The gray building across the street seemed a surprising reflection of the one she was standing in, but, locating the window at a level with hers, she found no reflection of herself. An adamantine sightlessness was in all things and in all creatures, and she was probably the last one to learn this. For too long a time, when even a moment was perilous, she had allowed herself the delusion that there was sight everywhere, in everything.

  She closed the drapes and lay down, face up, raincoat on, and exhausted as a penitent after a journey across a continent on foot, she wept and the tears streamed down her temples. For years, what a mighty struggle had gone on in her brother’s room! All the clothes of other men taking up the space that fear over his abandonment would have claimed, the fear that if given a chance would have filled up that cell completely.

  She slept in her clothes on top of the spread and was wakened by her desire to see her child and to hear her voice that, just by its sweet vivacity, would assure the mother she was a good person after all, despite any evidence to the contrary, and was even someone who could bestow a blessing. But even if she were able to put in a call to so far a place, to India, to Nepal, wherever the girl was now, her child had heard of the mother’s brother only once or twice, not enough times to know he truly existed. The only way she could tell about him now was to say Antonia, I wanted to tell you I love you, and the child would think the mother was nowhere else but home, waiting for her to come home. Unless she heard the sorrow under those words of love and would be a little afraid of what was kept quiet when love was voiced. She could call a friend, a woman back in San Francisco, a friend who had confided in her for years, but she had told that friend nothing about her brother. Martin was her confidant and one confidant was enough. She could tell only Martin about this entanglement of grief, but he was not at home, he was over on the mountain, lying in love through the afternoon.

  She bathed and lay down again, wanting to sleep until morning, wanting not to wake up in the middle of the night and set Martin’s phone to ringing in an empty house.

  Footsteps along the corridor wakened her. She heard a door being unlocked and heard a woman’s voice, buoyant, and heard a man’s voice, low, and then the closing of the door. It was two o’clock in the room, it was midnight on the coast, and the imagined bliss of lovers brought on again the dying away of herself. It lasted only a few moments, because the dying away of her brother forbade her to die away over such a trivial reason as the loss of a lover. Even if she were surrounded by lovers, even if every room was intended for lovers, if in all the rooms around her lovers were lying together now for the first time, loving through the night, inseparable, she was forbidden to die away from their midst.

  She brought her hand before her eyes, trying to see it as Martin had seen it that day, out in the sun and wind. Maybe he had called it beautiful just for its striving to form something of beauty, no matter how meager the results, how riddled with faults, and maybe he had known that the striving would save her from himself. If, for a time, you weren’t a lover, there were other ways to belong in life. Like her brother in his cell filled with the clothes of a hundred other men, in the cell of her mind she’d striven to become so many others, and in that way belong.

  16

  The fortress like an old-time gangster’s mansion where her brother lay—she went there again in the morning. She waited again at the heavy door with its high, round, opaque window like a blind eye. He must have passed this fortress countless times on errands of utmost importance for his future. Her first visit, the evening of the day she arrived, a man had peered out at her through the blind eye before he let her in. He wasn’t expecting anyone and he wore a green shirt and green plaid trousers. This morning he was attired in a black suit, clothes for a busy day.

  She told him her brother’s name in case he had forgotten she had signed a permission for him to claim her brother’s body at the hospital. He asked now, “Is he a tall fellow?” and then he remembered. Again she went up the wide, carpeted staircase, past empty, shaded chapel rooms. She wished to live.

  Upstairs at his desk he asked her, “Where do you wish to scatter the ashes?”—a whisper of false sympathy. “By the lake?” She shook her head. The lake waters were lead gray, miasmic, though people fished along its banks. “We often scatter the ashes over the cemetery.” There was something absurdly futile about that. “The forest preserve?” She had seen no forest preserve anywhere near this scorched and moldy city, but she nodded.

  Then she waited while the man flurried around behind a door to a small room. She hadn’t yet seen her brother, and when the door was opened for he
r and the man stepped aside and she went in.

  Under a sheet, only his head and feet exposed. Sparse black and gray tendrils of hair lay over his head, the dark curls gone. His nose was more curved, the nostrils more flared as if by all the odors and fragrances of his life. His feet, pointing outward, were very pale, the nails like discolored ivory, and the loneliness she had underestimated to save herself was now in its pure state. She kissed his brow to tell him that in the years apart she had loved him deeply despite the obstacle that was himself. Expecting the film of sweat, the same as the day they parted, she was surprised to find his brow cold and dry. Whatever her kiss meant to her, for him it was of no consequence, placed on his brow an eternity ago.

  Out in the sun again, she went on toward his street, assailed by the memory she had tried to keep away, of her brother striking their mother to the floor, and of herself, a child at the window watching him stride away, and wishing—afraid to pray for so awful a thing—that he would die someway, out there away from home. Yet they had loved him and he had wept and they had not sent him away, and as the years went by the turbulent youth gave way to the childlike man, but always the pariah, futilely camouflaged by all those clothes of all those other men who seemed to belong in the world.

  The closer she got to his street, the more articles of clothing lay along the curbs and in empty lots. They may have been there yesterday, even always, but she hadn’t seen them, just as yesterday she hadn’t seen the many persons tenaciously adrift in these few mild days.

  The landlady was in the vestibule, chatting with a white-haired woman coming slowly down the inside stairs, her cane feeling the way.

  “Dr. Muller,” the landlady said, introducing the woman and neglecting to name Ilona, simply “Albert’s sister.” Since the brother was gone, there was no necessity to ask or to remember the name of the sister. Like a calm, worldly physician, the woman smiled a half-smile of sympathy over the facts of life. A wise old woman lives down the hall from me. She revealed to me that Franklin D. Roosevelt, also known as F. D. R., had seven illegitimate daughters. She is the youngest. Nobody knows about this, so please keep it under your hat.

  “The Salvation Army, they tell me ‘No, thank you,’ ” the landlady said to Ilona. “They got too much stuff already. So we take Al’s stuff to the corner. Lots of people like free stuff.”

  Ilona asked her where she could find the man who had taken care of her brother, and the man who answered her knock was graciously quick, uncritical of whoever it was on the other side of the door. Slight, he stood very erect as if his spirit drew him upward while age shrank his body, two opposing forces.

  “I’m Albert’s sister,” she said. “I want to thank you for taking care of him.”

  “Please come in.”

  Ilona stepped into the room where her brother had lain and been tended, a room larger than her brother’s, tidy, with flowered curtains at the clean windows, a crocheted spread over the double bed, an armchair, small rugs, a cookstove.

  “I am so sorry about Albert,” he said. “Always a good morning, always polite. We will all miss him.”

  The odd, solitary figure of her brother was always to be expected, around a corner, down a corridor, on the seat next to you, any place, and this man was telling her, without his knowing, that she was not to blame for her brother’s aloneness, that her brother was not unlike all the solitary others, everywhere and always, each one odd in the way his own loneliness dictated.

  “Sit down, please.”

  She sat in the armchair and he told her he had been a pastry cook. He described the varieties of pastries and recalled the number baked each day for the guests of the hotel, and she saw that even such airy concoctions as pastry spirals in memory can sustain your esteem for yourself to the very end.

  “Did you know,” he asked, “that Ho Chi Minh was a pastry cook in Paris? I’ve followed his career with great interest. I suppose I, too, could have been a general under the right circumstances.”

  At the door they shook hands. His hand was small and smooth and warm, and he told her how he had admired her brother for his good cheer and consideration of others and told her again that all the tenants would miss him.

  She left the house then, the house whose atmosphere was her brother’s presence and her own, together. She had been one among the tenants because of his constant longing to see her again, because of his voice confiding and pleading over the pay phone in the dim vestibule, because of the countless times he must have imagined her at his side, entering the house with him, this place he had found for himself courageously in a city halfway across the country.

  The sky was overcast. It had been clear earlier in the day. Out in the street a man’s large white shoe lay on its side. Along the sidewalk, before a row of grime-dark apartment buildings, she passed a rubber overshoe, a belt, a man’s black shoe. A shirt hung over a stair-rail. Farther on, a mound of earth and rocks in a vacant lot changed into a tangle of clothes as she passed by, and to save her reason she thought: If they had not been there yesterday, all these scattered clothes, it didn’t mean they were his for sure. In a puddle of water by the curb a tie floated, partly blackened by the water, partly shiny blue, the blue an inducement to the overcast sky to show its true color.

  17

  The rain began while she waited by the hotel for the airport bus, a cold drizzle after the spell of warm weather. Three months later she was to see a newspaper item about the record cold in this city, and she was to picture the ice and snow over the earth of the forest preserve. Do you know where the forest preserve is? she had asked the landlady in the vestibule, and the landlady had answered If they say so, it’s there, suspecting perhaps that the sister doubted its existence even as she had wanted to doubt the existence of her brother.

  The plane rose into the rain darkening the sky before twilight. The rain was left behind and the sky was alight again for a little while, and then night took over.

  Up on the small screen, way forward in the cabin, a short documentary began. She watched without benefit of sound. A famous photographer in a large fur coat and hat to match was telling anecdotes about the celebrated ones whose photographs were as famous as the persons themselves. One after the other their faces appeared. The rotund face of a Pope whose name Ilona failed to remember, an old man’s face lively with a little boy’s pleasure over having his picture taken. The bland face of Eisenhower, gone before she could count the stars on his general’s cap. Hemingway’s face above a thick turtleneck sweater, like a sacrificial head on a platter. And oh! the very large sadness in Einstein’s moist old eyes, the white strands of hair drawn up in cosmic amazement. The forever young head of John Kennedy, an earnest university debater. Then the lion head of Albert Schweitzer, like a marble sculpture of a god both animal and man. And then the coveted face of Bardot—All is dross that is not Helen. Churchill’s old toad face, a toad vexed by the weight of the jewel in its head. Claud would look like that in another twenty years. Again, the photographer in his grand fur coat, relating interesting things she couldn’t hear, and in a moment he, too, vanished and the screen was white and empty, and then it, too, vanished.

  She gazed out at the night, but the faces on the screen remained before her eyes. They were always there before your eyes, whether you were awake or asleep, so highly visible were they. You could even assume they were among the blessed of the earth, if you wanted to, if that was your favorite delusion.

  Across the aisle, the three close-cropped soldiers began a laughing jag together, shouts and spurts of laughter, waking her from shallow sleep. Then in the calm after, only murmurs here and there in the dim cabin, a dream began to surface, a dream from several nights ago, or weeks ago, that shocked her now with its meaning. She was with Martin in a small room and she was whispering Don’t let him in but the door was open and her brother entered. Nothing could keep him away. He was a young man again but oh so different. A white skullcap was on his head, his eyes were lucidly dark, seeing beyond them, and he was
calm as he had never been, his being infinitely resigned to the journey. No tumult anymore, no frightful suppositions. He sat down in a chair against the wall, placed on the floor a portmanteau of a past century, and the room became a waiting room. He was on his way elsewhere.

  Far below lay the endless bas-relief mountains, lead color, iron color. There must be a moon, ravine shadows were sharp, and she thought—If some people were in the light, like the ones up there on the small screen, like Martin, like the woman he loved, like all those who were embraced wherever they went, it didn’t follow that all the rest were lost to the dark.

  18

  It was after midnight when she climbed the stairs to her apartment. She had heard Martin’s footsteps on these stairs that last night, and now she wished he was hearing hers and was drawn up from his chair or up from his bed and over to the phone, so that, when she turned the key in the lock, her phone would be ringing. The apartment was silent and remained silent.

  On the kitchen table a little book lay face down, as if the lamplight had placed it there on the instant. Almost weightless in her hand, Madeleine, by André Gide. Martin must have left it that last night when he came to be with her. Something would be underlined, a passage meant as a message to her. Often he, too, relied on the wiser ones of the world to describe his dilemmas. Ah, here it was, his borrowed message. She sat down, blaming her weariness on the days past, on the hours gazing down from a great height on the depthless solitude of earth, but knowing that the weariness was over messages offered in words. Everything uttered, everything written was a message she failed to comprehend and failed to act upon.